I Know You, Because I Am You
by EchidnaHazard
Summary: Just a little look back into Jimmy's past...I don't know why, but I've always had a thing for Mmy.


Mmy couldn't remember a time when he was happy, reflecting back on all of his childhood. Everything had been tainted with something, some reminder of the curse that seemed to hover over him.  
  
He had been born to an unfortunate family, second child of a mother and father who hated each other, in a household where the love had dried up almost as fast as the money. Even from the cradle, he had dim memories of being slapped when he cried too loud, hit when he whimpered too long for attention or something to play with or out of hunger.  
  
Jimmy was an accident and they never let him forget it, either. His older sister Elizabeth was no better off, really. When he was born she had been eight years old, a wide-eyed and pale child who did her best to substitute the love Jimmy wanted and wasn't going to get.  
  
He could remember hiding the bruises from the beatings his father gave him at school, avoiding the looks of concerned teachers and ducking questions from the counselors. He just wanted to be left alone. Sadly, though, this wasn't to be.  
  
The skinny little boy was teased more often than not, found himself constantly getting into fights, and couldn't focus in class. In first grade he pushed a desk over onto another boy who kept throwing spitballs at him, and he was subsequently suspended for a week. He had to go home and explain it to his father, and he had nursed the wounds resulting from that for a month, at least.  
  
The day after Jimmy's seventh birthday, Elizabeth committed suicide by overdose, and Jimmy lost his first and last line of support.  
  
His experiences up till then had left him as cold as steel, with none of its strengths. He found that he could get by in school with minimal effort if he never spoke and only did his work, and grew to be nine with this perception. At lunch he sat alone, at recess he sat on the rocks near the playground when one day his hero came into being from the warped depths of his imagination. He envisioned a dark, mysterious murderer with glittering blades and an evil smile, appearing from the shadows, striding out confidently as all laughter and chatter on the playground stopped. He imagined the screams of the bullies and the pretty little girls all as the murderer ripped into them with the knives, and the grass was watered with gore. The playground massacre was usually interrupted by someone throwing rocks at him for fun, or dancing around the rocks in a circle, chanting "Jimmy the jerkwad, Jimmy the jerkwad..."  
  
Jimmy doodled pictures of the shadowed superhero of his dreams, and he was always tall and skinny, like Jimmy, with spiky wild hair, always grinning and representing the happiness that was so elusive to his creator. For lack of a better name, Jimmy called his savior Darkness, the crusader of truth who saw the prickly evil of the rest of the world and moved to correct it. Darkness became his own nickname after a little while, 'Jimmy the jerkwad' was pushed into deep memory, where it stayed like a porcupine, extending spines to jab him without warning.  
  
Jimmy spent long periods of time alone on the playground after everyone else had left, not wanting to go home but having nowhere else to go. He wanted to run away, but he knew no one to take him in. He wanted to kill himself, but he was held back by the notion that if he did he would never be avenged for all the wrongs that had been done to him.  
  
Darkness could offer only the solace limited by his imagination: Jimmy knew what blood looked like from the movies, but really had no idea of how much would spurt when a child was stabbed repeatedly. But Jimmy knew he couldn't do anything to try to find out, because it would get him in trouble, and he remembered what happened the last time he took a situation such as the one he was facing now into his own hands.  
  
In physical education, Jimmy came last in every race, was picked last for every team game, and couldn't climb or run or play half as well as anyone else. After a very short time of being screamed at for missing every ball or causing his relay race to finish in dead last, Jimmy stopped trying. He knew he was pathetic, but he just wished he didn't keep having the constant jeering reminders. If everyone hated him so much, he should just die, he thought. His tenth and eleventh and then twelfth birthdays came and went without a change in his situation. Sometimes the only thing keeping him going was the invisible specter, Darkness.  
  
In time he grew to ignore all of what was happening in his life. He figured he couldn't do anything about any of it. He withdrew into himself, showing the world his fangs like a cornered animal would. When his thirteenth birthday came around, it was far too late to salvage anything that he might have been. Any money he managed to save up went to altering his appearance, buying clothes that would make him appear more intimidating, or CDs that sang messages that let him know he wasn't alone. In a bold move, he pierced his own ears to spite his father, who had called him gay on many an occasion, but Jimmy was never actually brave enough to wear earrings inside the house.  
  
By fifteen, Jimmy was completely gothic, and his invisible friend began to appear less frequently. But Jimmy couldn't even fit in with society's rejected: the goths wouldn't take him in, calling him a poser and a copycat. Jimmy realized they hadn't advanced any from the spiteful little brats they used to be. They might have been bigger, but their mentality hadn't grown at all.  
  
So Jimmy struck it off alone. Nobody could identify with what he'd been through quite like he could, after all, and he didn't really need company. He stayed gothic despite the accusations of simply posing, because it was all he could do.  
  
After a little while the dreaded teen acne began to surface, and he had it bad. He didn't attempt to fix it, seeing it as one more strike against him from some mythical, cruel-hearted god in the sky. He had stopped trying long ago, but was still able to slide by with Cs. He endured the teasing still, waiting for it to stop, waiting for the stunted little beasts to grow up and shut up and perhaps leave him alone, while they were at it. The years crawled by, one day blurring into another, all the same, being shoved into lockers and pummeled daily, being the center of attention in food fights...  
  
Being called a fag by just about everyone who comprised the student body, and he took it and took it and kept taking it. Anyone else would have broken down or given up long ago, but he found that although the hurt didn't stop, it became easier to absorb the punishments. He kept thinking it until his graduation year, when an alleyway fight escalated, and he was stabbed in the stomach. Only then did it become clear to him that it had to stop somewhere.  
  
He stayed in the hospital for a few days, while they did the customary checks, and he was informed later that he had a malignant intestinal cancer, besides. The cost was well out of the range of a poor family like his, but he was told he would die by the age of twenty-five unless the cancer was stopped. Caught between a rock and a hard place, he walked out of the hospital with a bandaged stomach, uncured, and started walking home. He decided he wouldn't tell his parents. They wouldn't care...  
  
Jimmy dug in his pocket, surprisingly calm for someone who had just been given a death sentence, and found a twenty-dollar bill he had been saving. He decided he deserved a CD, and headed off for one of his favorite places to buy them: the CD Cesspool. He was thinking either something by Nine Inch Heels or maybe a Mother Funk album when he heard the screaming and glanced across at the Taco Hell in surprise. Framed in the window, cackling like a madman, was a shadowed guy with spiky hair, waving a chainsaw.  
  
At first Jimmy assumed they were making a movie, but then he frowned. There was no camera crew or anything like that.... Intrigued, forgetting about NIH for the moment, he walked to the window and peered in just in time to see the maniac decapitate a young woman. He was screaming something, being drowned out by the panicked shrieks of the masses, and there was blood absolutely everywhere. Jimmy wondered how the madman didn't slip in it, but he seemed to have perfect balance as he dropped the chainsaw and withdrew gleaming knives from his backpack. His back was now turned to Jimmy, and he seemed lost in the rapture of the slaughter.  
  
Jimmy clenched the windowsill with both hands, wonderingly, his intestinal cancer at the back of his mind, the front comprised only of one thought.  
  
I must find out who this is...  
  
And the rest, as they say, is history. 


End file.
